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An anonymous reader writes "While there's much talk of Apple asking for more money from Samsung, there's less talk of the likelihood that the verdict will be overturned completely. Based on voir dire, and the foreman's subsequent statements to the press, it seems he failed to follow the law."

At this point Apple is actually copying Samsung, Samsung is a full generation ahead of where the iPhone in both hardware and software is, so anything that Apple does to the iPhone is just following Samsung, I think Samsung should come back and drive Apple into the ground.

You will have to remember that you are writing to a predominantly American audience and they have no idea of what the Samsung range of phones really look like. Have you seen the piece of shite that gets called a Galaxy II in the US and compared it to the Asian version. It is a completely different phone. Yes, Samsung are streets ahead of Apple but as Apple have managed to keep most of the Samsung products off of the American shelves the people there have no idea of where the real market is these days.

I was looking at tablets yesterday and there is no way that I would consider the Apple. I do prefer its gestures but it is so far behind in features (i.e. USB and microSD) that it is no good for my needs as I need a lot of storage. The phones are the same, I like the Apple but a couple of nice touches and gestures compared to usablilty means that it is not a contender and then when you look at the power of the Samsung you stop even considering the Apple.

I am an Apple fanboy or rather was prior to iOS. I much prefer using OSX with the ability to use the BSD CLI etc.

That and features you can get on your iphone by jailbreaking. When I upgraded to iOS5 it was because apps I needed were no longer compatible with iOS4, not because of any features: I already had pretty much all of them. If anything, I lost some features, at least until I jailbroke again.

At this point Apple is actually copying Samsung, Samsung is a full generation ahead of where the iPhone in both hardware and software is, so anything that Apple does to the iPhone is just following Samsung, I think Samsung should come back and drive Apple into the ground.

The problem with the law is that it takes so long that it's like hitting a puppy with a newspaper 3 days after it made a mess on the carpet. There was a period a few years ago when Samsung's new phones were blatantly copying the look and shape of the iPhone and the look of it's icons (especially when you look at the front-on publicity photos used in adverts). More recent products such as the SIII and Galaxy Note 10 are good examples of how you can make phones and tablets that don't look like an iDevice's long lost twin, and actually increase consumer choice when it comes to form factors. The question is, is that change evolution, or is it a response to Apple's lawsuits?

The other thing is that there seem to be two issues here - Apple vs. Android and Apple vs. the "Android Skinners". While it's pretty obvious that Android did a major U-turn from Blackberry-like to touch-only UI post- the iPhone launch, any accusation of violation depends on some rather broad and possibly obvious software patents (tap/pinch-to-zoom etc.) The first couple of Android phones out of the gate (the G1 and HTC Hero - I'm still using the latter) looked nothing like iPhones, featuring a distinctive 'chin' and trackball design - the first had a swivel-out keyboard FFS - and the UI may have been "inspired" by iPhone but you wouldn't mistake the two.

I think Samsung deserve a slapping for "skinning" their phones to look so much like iPhones (and, even if the jury finding is invalid, there was plenty of evidence from the internal memos, and memos from Google to show that was what they were doing). For one thing, this could be responsible for making Steve Jobs really see red over Android. Also, if you're begging for the verdict to be overturned, remember that the jury also threw out some of Samsung's rather broad claims about mobiles that were possibly even more absurd than Apple's, and decided that they didn't deserve a second round of royalties over cellular patents that they'd already licensed to the chip manufacturer.

Unfortunately, Apple now seems determined to go after Android itself, which seems rather futile and likely to hand the game back to Microsoft. The first consequence of getting into a pissing contest with Google has already hit home with Apple's sorry excuse for a Maps application in iOS 6.

NB: I use both iOS and Android and until the Maps debacle I'd been 50/50 whether my next phone would be an iPhone or an Android. Since Maps on my iPad is now worse than Maps on my geriatric phone I think it will be Android... if I can find one with an SD slot, an up-to-date, unskinned version of the OS and enough CPU/GPU power to be good for a couple of years, and a medium-size screen (I have a tablet - I don't want a second mini-tablet that won't fit in a regular jacket/shirt pocket). That's harder than it seems...

Apple wins in GPU benchmarks, but Apple hasn't innovated with the iPhone in a while. All the key features in both iOS 5 and iOS 6 existed in Android and Windows Mobile first.

When they announced the 4S and 5, you'll note neither have any key innovations.

People want to credit for the full-screen bar phone with multi-touch as this brilliant design that everyone copied. In reality, it is a common sense design that appeared in sci-fi for a reason. Once it became affordable to make it reality, then 3 different companies came up with the same design at the same time (LG, Samsung, Apple). What has Apple done since then literally other than copy heavily from those around them?

So Apple can't keep up with Samsung's hardware months later, and Samsung's hardware is cheaper. As for size, the iPhone 5 is slightly thinner and weights just a little less, but the S3 has a much bigger screen and more internal components. And how has Apple innovated with hardware engineering the past few years with the phone?

And I can go on all day about software innovations that blow the iPhone away. I still carry an iPhone 4S for work, and have been an iPhone owner for my personal phone since the 3GS. As someone who literally carries both an S3 and a 4S every day, the S3 is a far superior phone on pretty much every level.

Have you used the phone? Even with tons of apps installed and running, it is snappy and fast. The EU and NA versions of the S3 have different processors. The EU is actually a quad core processor, and the NA version is a dual core that is compatible with LTE. The clock speed is higher (1.5 GHz vs 1.0) than the Apple CPU, and it is built on the newer ARM core. The Samsung CPU is based on the A15 ARM core as opposed to the A9 core used by Apple.

Everyone I've demoed the phone to has been blown away by how fast it is, even with about 50 apps running in the background. Once Jelly Bean drops, it will be even faster.

Needed on the memory-hungry Android platform

I've never seen any evidence that Android is more memory-hungry than iOS. I do appreciate that I can directly kill processes in Android and I have zero control over that in iOS.

Compromising design and SD cards are a relic from a time when you wouldn't just stream your media.

What if you don't want to eat up your bandwidth if you have a data cap? What if you don't have a signal? Loading from SD is just faster than streaming. Being able to expand local storage and stream as well is a clear win.

An unproven technology that has security (see recent Galaxy S3 hack through NFC at Pwn2Own) and privacy implications that appears to be focused on mobile payments where we believe Passbook to be a superior solution.

Microsoft is requiring every single Windows 8 phone and tablet to have it. Apple has a number of NFC patents and clearly intends to use it at some point, but has yet to deliver on it. NFC has been around since 2002 and is heavily used in Japan. It isn't new, unproven technology.

Made possible only by making the S3 1.2mm thicker than the iPhone 5.

The S3 is 1 mm thicker, not 1.2. It is 13% thicker, but has 33% more battery. Samsung engineering win there.

With a scratch-prone lens, as opposed to our high scratch-resistant sapphire lens.

Both are listed as scratch-resistant lenses. But the iPhone 5 sapphire lens should be more scratch resistant. That is a minor win for Apple there. It should be noted that the front-facing camera is still nicer on the S3, and Apple just now caught up to features many Android phones have had for over a year (photos during video, panorama mode, etc). And Apple still can't do burst photos like Android.

We believe our connector...

It is inexcusable to change to yet another proprietary connector in 2012 and not support USB 3.0. It will have slower transfer speeds and require proprietary adapters.

1) This was at launch, which goes to my point of what have they done in recent years? And they didn't invent the app store. Carriers had their own app stores first.2) Blackberry phones had 10+ hours of active battery before the iPhone. And Apple hasn't been the only company pushing mobile battery technology.3) Who honestly makes phone purchase decisions by how thin it is? And they aren't the only ones pushing this envelope. The iPhone 4S was the thinnest, until a few Android phones beat it, and now the iPho

Recent benchmarks? Oh wait, did you forget that you're comparing against a bazaar of active innovation (funny how actual innovation moves fast, isn't it?) that comes out with a new phone once a week? So just wait a few days and Apple will again be lower on the bar in terms of performance again. Of course, it'll take Apple another 2 years to again get themselves back on top, but it will have been worth it to have the best specs for such a short time frame.

So playing with the phone for 25 minutes now counts as "using" the phone?

You are an iphone fan. Like may other iphone fans even if you were handed a cell phone that was better in every way you would still say the iphone was better.

Personally I feel you need to use a phone for a few weeks to begin to get used to it. All cell phones should have a 60 day trial period. You use the phone for 60 days. You can return that phone for any reason no questions asked up to 60 days. That way you can actually use the phone and see how it works for you. I know never going to happen, but it would be good to have that.

I totally agree that we need choice, I do prefer the S3 but I much prefer having choice. My g/f and my son have iPhones and I have Android. We are all happy with what we have and do not have any problem with the other liking something different. The Apple/Samsung case is bad because they are taking away choice. Fight it for that reason.

22 grams will not worry me but the iPhone 5 is Talk time: Up to 8 hours on 3G and the Galaxy III is up to 11 h 40 min (3G), I can manage that extra 22 grams in my pocket for 50% more use. As for ahead, I think that means the iPhones dual core 1.2 compared to the Samsung quad core 1.4. Content, total freedom instead of restricted, Samsung wins hands down.

The S3 is a quad core as standard, not overclocked or any other dumb comment. The only market that it is not a quad care is the US because the people there cannot cope with real phones yet. Stop reading the US propaganda and look at the real world. The iPhone is slow. The S3 does so much more and has applications that are not even on the iPhone. Just because you live in a backwater does not mean that rest of us are still using the old tech that you have to put up with.

Being a Fandroid would mean I support it no matter what, I'm just making a correct statement. The Android development time right now for a hardware / software co release is about 6 months and Apple is riding a year, so in the time the "new" iPhone comes out it's already sitting behind the curve. In fact Apples is losing the smart phone market slowly, they no longer have the biggest mobile OS and they don't have the best hardware. All they have is a fan base forged in stone that will take a bullet out of

Unless you want the only mobile device you can ever buy to be Apple, I'd suggest that you take a bit more interest in it. Because if things keep going the way they are, there will be NO other choice in cell phone or tablet. You will either pay Apple's premium price for 2nd rate hardware and 5th rate support or you will do without.

Even Google said that Samsung was probably making their products look a little too much like the iPhone.

And then you've got the Nokia Lumia series, which not only doesn't infringe (and is a design that Apple themselves used to show that you can build a non-infringing phone), it's far and away the most beautiful phone design on the market today, in my mind. I WISH Apple would make something that looks like that. (I like my iPhone 4, but that Lumia really does look amazing.)

Oh, and the Windows phone OS design is ALSO an indication that you can build something that isn't anything close to the iOS design.

In my mind, Apple's crazy patents are the BEST way to ensure that there's choice in the market, not just choice between two of effectively the same thing. It's the big departures from the well established norms that bring interesting things to us. Apple's original entry into the Smartphone space was hugely disruptive, and they were very successful. Samsung has piggybacked on that success, whether you agree that they infringed or not. It's going to take another company doing the same sort of wild thing to really bring us something new and innovative.

Like I said, I own an iPhone 4, but I don't expect Apple to do anything innovative with their phone for years, if ever. They've made the product they wanted (something high quality and easy to use), and they'll stick with that--and that's not a terrible thing. There are worse ways to run a business. But for me to get EXCITED about phones again, well, that'll take someone doing something really revolutionary that I can't miss. Right now, beyond expectations, that looks like Microsoft. If they can really strike out on their own and differentiate their phone from everyone else, they'll claw their way into contention.

But Apple vs. Samsung is really just a sort of nitpicky argument. The iPhone 5 is better in some ways, and the Galaxy is better in others, but they do the same basic things. It's like comparing fridges. Both of them keep your food cold, but one has an ice dispenser and the other has a digital temperature readout. You pick and choose based on your needs at the time, but the Smartphone market is basically a choice between dull appliances now.

People need to stop throwing the word "innovate" around when they don't understand the confines of innovation within a certain market. There's nothing left for a phone to do. There is literally no more innovation that can be made with a mobile phone. The next step is a cochlear implant that interfaces with your brain, or smart glasses, to store your data and display webpages. Further innovation is unnecessary. We also need to stop trying to follow Moore's Law as if it applies in some sort of qualitative wa

Even Google said that Samsung was probably making their products look a little too much like the iPhone.

Because Google assumed Apple would go after Samsung on ridiculous grounds, like rounded corners and icons in a grid. That doesn't make Apple's grounds legitimate.

And then you've got the Nokia Lumia series, which not only doesn't infringe (and is a design that Apple themselves used to show that you can build a non-infringing phone), it's far and away the most beautiful phone design on the market today, in my mind. I WISH Apple would make something that looks like that. (I like my iPhone 4, but that Lumia really does look amazing.)

Oh, and the Windows phone OS design is ALSO an indication that you can build something that isn't anything close to the iOS design.

Apple knows damn well that Windows Phone doesn't pose any threat to their dominant position. Add to that the fact that Apple and Microsoft invested together in the establishment of a gigantic patent troll, and then you see how Apple would want to pretend like there is a competitor that "doesn't infringe". Let's conveniently forget the fact that the

There is literally nothing that people "taking more interest" could have do to change the outcome of that trial. Obsessively following groklaw isn't going to reform patent law, and complaining on the internet is not activism.

Unless you want the only mobile device you can ever buy to be Apple, I'd suggest that you take a bit more interest in it. Because if things keep going the way they are, there will be NO other choice in cell phone or tablet. You will either pay Apple's premium price for 2nd rate hardware and 5th rate support or you will do without.

Ignoring the fact that Samsung was suing Apple at the same time, or that the iPhone was banned in Korea for two years.

That doesn't mean one isn't better for us consumers than the other one.

Today for lunch, I could eat leftover chili from last night, or I could eat a moldy sandwich that happens to be in the fridge. I don't know how old the sandwich is, but I'm guessing it will make me sick.

Neither is delicious pizza, which I want to eat, so I guess it doesn't matter which one I eat, huh? I'll just flip a coin.

This just isn't about two marketing machines fighting. The US patent office and the US courts are involved. That makes the stakes considerably higher. The results could have serious long term consequences.

In terms of "the big picture", patents very much matter.

In some place they mean the difference between life and death.

Your just trying to white wash the situation and pretend that there is nothing serious or important going on here.

I loved his position that a piece of prior art could be dismissed because the implementation discussed ran on a different processor architecture. Judicial functionaries have a proud history of pulling distinctions out of their asses and calling them 'tests'(later given first names, if they catch on more broadly); but that one was classic.

Yeah that quote was pretty bad. But I actually feel some sympathy for the jurors.. this case was so full of complicated issues, of trade dress, prior art, infringement, etc, and there were so many of these questions at hand (700??) that I don't know how any jury of laypeople could ever really untangle it all. I think they did just what most people would do. Boil it down to a couple of overly simplistic litmus tests, that you can just hold up each one to and say "yup,"yup","nope".. x700. Which of course is

Oh, I don't really blame the jurors for being dubiously clueful about ghastly intricate patent law(and probably unenthusiastic about spending months poring over the case), especially when the patent office itself has gone through a few waves of "just like things we did on mainframes and minicomputers; but over the internet and therefore novel!" and "just like things we did on PCs over the internet but on mobile phones and therefore novel!" patent grants themselves, and they are supposed to know better.

If Samsung's defence was based on the Apple patents baing invalid because of prior art, why are they not attacking these patents directly? It may be a tough way to go but their current strategy is in trouble.

Samsung lawyers are doing that as well in one [groklaw.net] of the many filings. Basically calling each of the patents asserted by Apple invalid due to indefiniteness because of vague words like "substantially centered", ambiguous use of dotted lines in the design patents, and so on.

excerpt:Claim 50 uses such a term of degree, requiring that the first and second "boxes of content" be "substantially centered" on the touch-screen display. JX 1046.49 (emphasis added.) [...] There are no tests, parameters, or other criteria for determining whether such a box is or is not "substantially centered."

If Samsung's defence was based on the Apple patents baing invalid because of prior art, why are they not attacking these patents directly? It may be a tough way to go but their current strategy is in trouble.

Because they have their own portfolio of obvious, over-broad, prior-art-infested patents that might become worthless if they create any legal precedents against obvious, over-broad, prior-art-infested patents?

If you want to see patent law cleaned up, don't expect it to come from a trial between two big patent holders.

You have to realize that Samsung was repeatedly refused to allow relevant evidence or experts. It was extremely frustrating, and Samsung eventually got pissed enough to release stuff out in the public. Which stopped some of the injustice.

Most of it stemmed from an email bias. Where Samsung was accused of destroying evidence by not keeping emails. Apple wasn't keeping the emails either, and just pleaded that they don't do those sorts of things.

This case was a boondoggle.

***

Just the fact that the jurors were selected from Silicon Valley is in and of itself enough to claim extreme prejudice to this case.

Everything that Apple sued over is prior art. Seriously.... 100% of it. I don't understand why Samsung's legal team didn't just go camp at the USPTO with their prior art and get those patents revoked. No patent = no law suit. What a bunch of screw ups. And Apple is infringing everyone from HTC to Mitsubishi to Nokia to IBM with their "patents". Feel free to pile on and offer up your own examples of prior art....
http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/457/prior-art-should-invalidate-apples-patents [stackexchange.com]

I'll be VERY surprised if the verdict is overturned. Why? Because history has shown that geeks absolutely suck when it comes to rooting for someone as far as court cases are concerned.

Evidence: Hans Reiser, Thomas-Rasset, Pirate Bay founders, Apple vs. Samsung. In each of those cases there were plenty of people on Slashdot who supported the defendant(s) and figured there was no way they'd be found guilty, much less with any serious penalties. Yeah about that...

I just don't get it. Here, we have one of the richest companies in the world suing another over an issue of their products being similar. What. crap. The only innovation either side has really come up with is creative new uses for lawyers and patent/trade dress laws, and lets face it, those innovations are not really serving to advance society in any way (I'm sure lawyers would argue differently, but I'm not gonna pay them to and if you don't either, they probably won't say anything). Do we have any idea wh

For that matter, didn't anyone here read google news the next day? There was an article about one of the jurors saying that the foreman had a patent, and explained to them IN THE JURY ROOM how it worked, and they thought that prior art was so complicated that they skipped it.....

That is NOT what the jury said if you read the full statement. Your as bad as fox news with taking a snippet and carrying on with it, totally out of context. The jury said they took the easy questions first, that could be agreed upon with only a small amount of discussion. And saved the ones where people were really far apart and divided and saved those for later discussion. This is the same way you take standardized tests. You knock out the easy questio

That is NOT what the jury said if you read the full statement. Your as bad as fox news with taking a snippet and carrying on with it, totally out of context. The jury said they took the easy questions first, that could be agreed upon with only a small amount of discussion. And saved the ones where people were really far apart and divided and saved those for later discussion. This is the same way you take standardized tests. You knock out the easy questions first. When this person said they skipped prior art... they didn't disregard it or refuse to consider it. They tabled it for the lengthier discussion due to its complexity (skipped it from the initial discussion) and did indeed discuss it in quite a bit of detail. Please quit putting your faux-news tidbit spin on this. That's been discredited several times. Go read up on it.

Actually OP is pretty close. Watch the Bloomberg interview again, it's on Youtube. You can skip to the 2:00 mark. Hogan states that they were discussing one (Samsung's '460 patent...he's suggesting this is the first one they began discussing) patent on the first day. Later at home, he starts thinking that patent "claim by claim, limit by limit "and how he would defend it in court. His "ah-ha" moment was that the two implementations were not interchangeable because "Apple's software could not be placed

A lot of comments are kind of off track from what the article is linked to. There are two inconsistencies that are kind of connected. On page 7 of exhibit 1, he declares that he settled a lawsuit out of court in which he was sued by a programmer that worked for him over ownership of code. He also appears to have been involved in a second lawsuit, which he doesn't mention, in which he was sued by Seagate. He should have declared that as well. Secondly and more importantly, from the same exhibit, he promises to decide the case based on the evidence presented, and not drawing on any personal experience:

NOW, SAME FOR MR. TEPMAN, AS WELL AS TO
MR. HOGAN. YOU ALL HAVE A LOT OF EXPERIENCE, BUT
WILL YOU BE ABLE TO DECIDE THIS CASE BASED SOLELY
ON THE EVIDENCE THAT'S ADMITTED DURING THE TRIAL?

The USPTO is a patent minefield, granting obvious stuff simply because certain Americans think its hard to do.

Corroborative commentary which by no means reflects the view of the author of this comment and merely serves as an indicative backdrop to the post as a whole.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdIWKytq_q4http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE

Even understanding simple issues like what was actually at issue seem too hard for most.

It wasn't Android that was in dispute but Samsungs own extensions that made it more Apple like which is why Google didn't pile in.

Note: Google/Motorola has now piled in and is asking for a United States wide ban on all Apples products.

http://www.usitc.gov/press_room/news_release/2012/er0917kk3.htm

One might see this as a retaliatory strike, who can tell, you reap what you sow.

But you have a to call to question the sanity of a process for instance that in the SCO v IBM case is still rumbling on after 9 years in the USA where as in the rest of the world, Germany for instance... a simple and commensense approach was merely to say go away SCO and pay £30,000 euros every day you keep spouting bollocks.

I'm a big Android fan, I've used various Android ROMs on my rooted phone, and on my tablet. Over Labor Day I got my hands on a Samsung Galaxy 5 Player. This was unlike any Android I've used before. The UI was re-worked quite a bit and my first reaction was "This feels more like an Apple device". The desktop (for lack of a better word) was set up so the home page was the first window, and all extra were on the right (like Apple, where android has the home be the center window). The icons in the app tray had a background image put behind them that made it feel very apple like. The Samsung apps on it looked like Apple apps (Like a notepad that had the same icon as Apple's app). It wasn't a stretch to see many of the UI elements were taken from the iPhone. It was to the point where I had to search for settings, because the UI was more Apple-like than Android-like.

As much as I hate to say it, as I really loathe Apple products... I think Apple has a case here for the specific devices that the look/feel were copied. The Samsung S3 has a much more "Android" feel to it. It isn't Android, but a custom ROM Samsung made using Android to make their own version of an iPhone.

I think Apple has a case here for the specific devices that the look/feel were copied.

There is no such thing as look and feel [wikipedia.org] in law. There is only a creative attempt by Apple to make some new law by suing Microsoft over trashcans etc some years ago, and there is "trade dress" in copyright law... a long shot.

We do have copyright laws for style. Fonts are protected, even though the alphabet is clearly in public domain. We have many lawsuits over the look of a logo, even the use of color in an advertisement... Plan on Red background with white cursive lettering? Coca-Cola will be in touch with you.

Fonts are protected, even though the alphabet is clearly in public domain.

Interestingly enough, fonts in America are not covered by copyright [wikipedia.org], although the computer instructions that describe a font are. It is legal to clone fonts in America of you do it optically, and don't copy any code. This is how, for example, Microsoft could create Book Antiqua, which looks virtually identical to Hermann Zapf's Palatino.

Fonts are NOT protected by copyright US copyright law (much to the chagrin of font designers... yet somehow we survive and people still come up with new ones) what is protected is the "software" to display the font can be covered by an end user license agreement (the infamous EULA) and restrict you from using the font package as provided for you in the software on another computer without a license. You can and it is entirely legal to do so in the USA is copy the exact characters (Manually not with a soft

Actually, there is no "look and feel" currently, but years ago, Lotus won a lawsuit against Borland for exactly that. It took a number of years to get the verdict reversed, and in the interim, Borland was pretty much crippled. They couldn't obtain new investors. They couldn't even find anyone to buy the company. Despite this they still developed products like Delphi that were significantly better than anything M$ developed. Eventually the verdict was overturned.

The final result of the financial squeeze was the firing of Philippe Kahn and the takeover of Borland by the bean counters. It was all downhill from there. The Lotus case proved that a crappy lawsuit can actually destroy a company over a period of years.

I had a Galaxy S1 and now have a S3. The S1 - you could say it looked like an iPhone 3GS, but no one would confuse the two phones. It was clearly bigger, the back was different, it was different colours, it felt different to hold/use, and it had SAMSUNG in big letters across the front.

The S3 looks nothing like any Apple device.

The wall warts looked nothing like the iPhone ones for either of those phones. The packaging looked the same - you know, a rectangular box. Pretty much all phones come in such a box,

I have 2 Samsung devices, a tablet (P7500) and first Galaxy S and even though I try hard, I can't get what on earth is "apple like" in them.
Default video player? MX Player is all I use, default one supported less formats
Background image? Samsung uses shiny pics with vivid colors, how is it "apple like"?
And how is having WIDGETS on the home screen "Apple like" pretty please?

Don't you have that the other way around? I'd say that given the direction Apple is going in with its phone and tablet offerings they are trying to create their version of recent Android-powered devices. From multitasking to drag-down notifications to bigger screens to the demise of *beep* iTunes for some functionality to, well, you name it. All those 'new' things Apple comes up with have been done before in Android (and many other systems, but Apple-Android folks seem to prefer dichotomies).

I'm not sure how anyone could even offer 'tested' in the present legal climate. Aside from the fact that individual judges and juries are unpredictable, are there even enough paralegals with relevant knowledge of US patent law to throw at the problem of determining whether a given complex system is noninfringing or legitimately licensed against all currently valid patents? That's an epic task search and (somewhat)natural language processing problem.

Indemnification is at least possible; but if you are practically guaranteed to have a few trolls hit you for low to moderate millions in the rocket docket, and there is the possibility of a huge lawsuit or two, it isn't going to be inexpensive, since it'll basically amount to insurance...

Good to see paranoia reign supreme on Slashdot. Of course it must be that he's a paid shill, and not one of a hundred more reasonable and boring possibilities such as:

1: He genuinely thinks that Microsoft's phone is a safer bet in case Android gets in more trouble
2: He's a fan of Microsoft products or dislikes Google (yes, someone can still like a company, yet not work for them).
3: He said it ironically/trollingly to get a reaction, as he too dislikes the patent mess, and wants people to get fired up about it (to motivate them or something?)
4: He's somewhat ignorant about the whole (complicated) situation (as I suppose everyone is to a degree)
5: Any combination of the above

Not really. We are not an insignificant group in the tech world. We are the support reps, admins, developers, bosses, and coworkers of many many people. We tend to be the more tech savvy and more then likely have large numbers of friends and family who come to us for advice for tech purchases.

I believe NULLIFICATION, would allow them to not charge Samsung even if the law allowed them to. (ie: Yes, we feel that Samsung infringed Apple's trade dress. But we do not feel that Apple should have rights to rounded corners. So we are NULLIFYING that claim. And not allowing Samsung to be charged.)

That is very different from FABRICATION, we feel this, so we're going to charge Samsung and deal them harsh penalties to teach them a lesson.